Nodebuster

Nodebuster

BANGER · Strategy · 2024

Steam Deck Playable

The verdict

BUY IT.

A BANGER at $2.99.

Length
3.6h
Value
$0.83/hr
Reviews
97% positive

Recent reviews trending down: 88% over the last 30 days against 97% all-time.

Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying.
Length
3.6h
main story (HowLongToBeat)
Completionist
4.1h
100% (HowLongToBeat)
$/hr
$0.83
price ÷ main-story length
Price
$2.99
as of Sep 23
Reviews
97%
13,962 reviews, as of Aug 3
Players
350K
owners (estimate)
Released
2024

Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, Vulkan 1.0, 102 MB of storage. Windows only.

Nodebuster is a short, experimental incremental game about busting nodes and destroying reality.
Description from the Steam store page.

What drives the score

How to read this

Grades run S to D, read from the buyer's side. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. How the grades work

Raising the score
Value$0.83/hr
Price per hour of game. It moves the score inside the ceiling reviews set
Reviews97% positive
Gates the score. Weak reviews cap it, and nothing reaches BANGER without strong ones
For context
Length3.6 hours
How much game you get. Hours feed the value per dollar
Reach350K+ players
How many own it, a popularity + confidence signal
MonetizationNot known
No monetization record for this game, so nothing is assumed either way
Refunds3 of 655 reviews
Steam-purchase reviews sampled whose writer refunded the game. Nothing is docked

The value story

June 2025 is where it bottomed out, at $1.94. Its cuts run 35 percent off as a rule. There have been 9 in the 2 years tracked, about 12 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 12 weeks.

Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is cheaper than 83 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Cookie Clicker ($4.99, scores 98) beats it on value, while it beats (the) Gnorp Apologue ($6.99, scores 83).

The math says it holds its tier up to $11.10, and you are being asked for $2.99.

Players rate it 97 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 88 percent. Something recent has soured the room. 3 of the 655 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written August 2024 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 89 percent of the 398 reviews written there were positive, against 97 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it.

The drop-off

99% start to 76% rarest
050100rarestfirst achievement

No achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements

Players

About 50 players at once, at SteamSpy's last count.

Player counts via SteamSpy.

What players say

Eh. It starts out pretty fun, but becomes a full-time idle game when you can only get "netcoins" to progress. To get those... yeah, you have to wait. That's it. Pretty boring at that point and completely breaks the game IMHO. I'd say it's ok. Definitely nowhere near what it needs to be for these glowing reviews though...
Bacon Overlord®Not recommendedafter 1.4h7 found this helpfulRead on Steam

Steam reviews, mixed to match its Steam ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.

No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).

Cite this score

BANG Score badge
Nodebuster scores 97/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/3107330/nodebuster
Embed the live badge

Reviews set the ceiling, and price against real length moves the BANG Score inside it. How it works, and where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 3, price as of Sep 23.

A number here look wrong? Tell me and I will check the inputs.

Tags

Details

DeveloperGoblobin
PublisherGoblobin
GenreStrategy
Released2024
Achievements13